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| Clinton fundraiser pleads guilty to fraud |
| 2009-05-10 |
| [Iran Press TV Latest] A former fundraiser for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has pleaded guilty to running a fraudulent multimillion-dollar investment scheme. Norman Hsu pleaded guilty to five counts of mail fraud and five counts of wire fraud at a hearing before a federal judge in Manhattan on Thursday. Hsu admitted to taking money from investors, promising them high returns and then using later investment money to make payments, The New York Times reported on Friday. "I knew what I was doing was illegal," Hsu acknowledged. Hsu would face up to 20 years in prison on mail and wire fraud charges. He has not pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud and his trial on those charges is scheduled to begin Monday. Investigators say Hsu took in as much as $60 million and defrauded investors of about one-third of this amount. Prosecutors say Hsu used straw donors to make campaign contributions and then repaid them. In 2007, Hillary Clinton's campaign agreed to return $850,000 in funds raised through Hsu. Clinton, now the secretary of state, was running for president at the time. |
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| Norman Hsu gets three years in '91 fraud case |
| 2008-01-06 |
| Dismissing a claim that Norman Hsu's right to a speedy trial had been violated because California authorities didn't fully pursue him after he fled from justice 16 years ago, a San Mateo County judge on Friday sentenced the former Democratic fundraiser to three years in prison for fraud. Hsu faces a number of other legal troubles. Last month a federal grand jury in New York indicted Hsu, 56, on charges of operating a large new Ponzi scheme and making illegal campaign contributions to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and others. The sentencing provided long-awaited satisfaction to Hsu's prosecutors and victims. "I am very pleased," said Ronald D. Smetana, the California deputy attorney general who handled the earlier fraud case against Hsu from its inception. "It is often said that justice delayed is justice denied, but not in this case." |
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| Fifth Column |
| James Lewis: Soros the Guiltless |
| 2007-10-16 |
| One of the marks of traumatic stress is a constant feeling of guilt. Some of the rescue workers at Ground Zero on 9/11 still suffer from survivor guilt today. They constantly wonder, "Why did those people die? Why not me?" Yet guilt is what makes civilized society possible; it's what keeps us from unleashing our most selfish impulses on each other. Not everybody is capable of feeling guilt. Psychopaths do not experience it. That is a defining feature of the disorder. That is why psychopaths can do things that would haunt most of us forever. Think of O.J. Simpson, or a repeating child abuser who never shows remorse. Some human beings flip guilt on its head, and turn it into rage against others. That may be true for Jimmy Carter and his NSC Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinsky, who are constantly blaming others for the fatal blunder of bringing the nuke-mad mullahs to power in Iran in 1979. Thousands upon thousands of innocent people have died as a result, but neither Carter nor Brzezinsky has ever owned up to their responsibility. They don't seem to feel guilt about the looming threat of mullahs with nukes, but they are constantly pointing the finger at others. Which brings me to George Soros, one of the top 100 richest people in the world. Mr. Soros is one of those odd hybrids, the socialist capitalist: He has made it very big indeed, but he doesn't want others getting rich in free markets. Instead, we are told, he wants "a strong central international government to correct for the excesses of self-interest." Such as his own $8.5 billion fortune, presumably, made partly on currency speculation. Soros is the moneybags behind Moveon.org and Media Matters, two Leftwing fronts that constantly try to drop Black PR bombs in the media, always trying to smear the democratic Right. But they are so rage-driven, so far beyond the pale, that they risk triggering a backlash. Moveon couldn't resist smearing one of the most admirable people in America, General David Petraeus, as "General Betray-Us," in the pages of the New York Times. Media Matters tried to get away with smearing the biggest patriotic voice in the country, Rush Limbaugh. Moveon and M-M are slander squads funded by György Schwartz, later known as György Soros (with two sh-sounds), and later George Soros, US citizen. In his autobiograpy, modestly entitled Soros on Soros, he described how as a teenager he helped to cart off the stolen possessions of Hungarian Jewish men, women and children after they were rounded up and transported to death camps. He claims it never bothered him a bit, and still doesn't bother him today. He has no personal regrets about his actions. Somebody would have done it. Normal people are haunted by harsh self-criticism after such morally toxic situations, even if they were helpless at the time. But Mr. Soros is blessedly free from any qualms, as he tells us. From a 60 Minutes interview with Soros on December 20, 1998: KROFT: (You) went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews. Mr. SOROS: Yes. That's right. Yes. KROFT: I mean, that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult? Mr. SOROS: Not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't see the connection. But it created no problem at all. (Note: Mr. Soros was not a child in 1944. Teenagers are well aware of moral rules.) KROFT: No feeling of guilt? Mr. SOROS: No. KROFT: For example that, 'I'm Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.' None of that? Mr. SOROS: Well, of course I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was --- well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in markets, that if I weren't there, of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would be taking it away anyhow. And whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt." George Soros absolves himself constantly. He calls himself a "spectator" when he was an active collaborator. His only reply is that, well, he could have been "on the other side" --- a victim rather than a perp. His is an instrumental morality. Now we don't know exactly what happened sixty years ago in the life of György Schwartz during the Nazi Holocaust. According to Robert Slater, "George Soros later said that he grew up in a Jewish, anti-semitic home,' and that his parents were uncomfortable with their religious roots.'" We don't know if his parents' anti-semitism influenced his willingness to cart off the property of his Jewish neighbors. But by 1944, Hitler's plans for the Jews could not be denied. Soros himself escaped persecution by being adopted as a Christian. He must have known what he was doing therefore, even as a teenager. Two years later, when Auschwitz and the other death camps made headlines all over the Western world, not even the young Soros could have denied his role in what happened. But George Soros felt free of guilt. Soros' parents were internationalists, promoting the worldwide spread of a single language, Esperanto. Chances are they were anti-Nazi, but also anti-American. Little György grew up speaking Esperanto, the language of the Socialist Paradise to Come. But reality intervened, and Soros became a highly successful capitalist, in some pretty dubious ways. For instance, Soros has been blamed for crashing the national currency of Malaysia in 1997. He is still hated for that by Mahathir Mohammed, the former prime minister of that country, who has emerged as a major international voice of Islamic anti-Semitism. Soros claims that somebody would have profited from speculating in Malaysian currency. He may be right. But many of us might not want to be anywhere near the crashing currency of a poor country, even if somebody else would do it anyway. We would feel ashamed to profit from disaster. According to Wikipedia, Soros is famously known for breaking the Bank of England' on Black Wednesday in 1992. On Black Wednesday (September 16, 1992), Soros became immediately famous when he sold short more than $10 billion worth of pounds, profiting from the Bank of England's reluctance to either raise its interest rates to levels comparable to those of other European Exchange Rate Mechanism countries or to float its currency. ... He was dubbed "the man who broke the Bank of England. ... Soros first traded currencies during the Hungarian hyperinflation of 1945-1946. In 2002 a French court ruled that Soros was guilty of insider trading, and fined him $2 million. Who knows? He might be innocent. But there is a repeated pattern of manipulative and destructive actions in Mr. Soros' life. According to Byron Rork of the National Review, "the (Soros) Open Society Institute gave $20,000 in September 2002 to the Defense Committee of Lynne Stewart." Stewart is the "activist" lawyer who secretly passed messages for the "blind sheik" and his fellow Muslim terrorists convicted of trying to truck bomb the World Trade Towers in 1993. Soros funded support for democracy movements in Eastern Europe with the fall of the Soviet Union, but he also supported marijuana legalization in California and elsewhere, which is irresponsible, to say the least. Marijuana has been credibly linked to psychotic breaks and other mental disorders in adolescence. Marijuana smoke contains some of the same carcinogens as tobacco smoke, although no causal link has been established as yet. Proving such a link takes years and hindreds of millions of dollars. Why would any responsible person pay for a campaign that will end up making highly potent marijuana more available to vulnerable people? If booze harms millions of alcoholics, why double the risk by legalizing yet another powerful brain drug? Soros was also a major backer of the Campaign Reform Act of 2002, supposedly "to get money out of politics" --- whereupon he immediately funded Leftist front groups using loopholes in the same law. It was other people's money he didn't want in politics. Politicians are now collecting just as much money as before, and from some very dubious sources. (See Norman Hsu.) In an interview with The Washington Post on November 11, 2003, Soros said that removing President George W. Bush from office was the "central focus of my life" and "a matter of life and death." He said he would sacrifice his entire fortune to defeat President Bush, "if someone guaranteed it." Soros later claimed he was joking. But he has written articles such as "The Capitalist Threat" in the Atlantic Monthly, and funded something called "Democracy Alliance: In Search Of A Permanent Democratic Majority." It seems he wasn't joking after all. He looks like he wants total power for the Left. And now we find Mr. Soros backing aggressive Leftist smear groups in America. Mr. Soros also blames Israel for the fate of the Palestinian Arabs sixty years ago. Israel was founded as a place of refuge for millions of Jews from places like Hungary, the same people Soros helped to dispossess as a teenager. As he said in his 60 Minutes interview, his Holocaust experience "helped to shape his character" --- a double-edged comment if ever there was one. Mr. Soros fancies himself to be a philosopher, like so many educated middle-Europeans. Well, Adam Smith was professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh; we know him as the first economist to clearly state the benefits of free trade. But Adam Smith always emphasized the importance of having a clear moral compass. Capitalism in the raw is not the same as capitalism constrained by morality and law. Soros seems to think of capitalism as a kind of piracy, and personal morality does not seem to play a conspicuous role in his life. Instead, he seems to like to be the supreme manipulator. It makes an interesting psychological profile, doesn't it? On the one side, calm denial about his Holocaust role in Hungary, and decades later, about his part in manipulating currencies from Britain to Asia, benefiting himself but impoverishing others. On the other hand, his funding of very aggressive political mudslinging teams in the United States, openly trying to bring down a twice-elected president of the United States. Add to that his animosity toward Israel, a home for Jewish refugees from the same European Holocaust that saw him collaborating with the Nazis. We live in a time of steady public decline in civilized values. The Left shamelessly peddles the idea that real patriotism means leaking national security secrets when our soldiers are risking their lives in combat. The national media have become so vulgarized that scapegoating GOP presidents has become the open aim of the "profession" of journalism. Opportunistic demagogues like Al Gore jump on the phony Global Warming bandwagon, and are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, thus raising his public image while debasing the Nobel Prize. We have seen immense vulgarization in one generation, a loss of simple decency in public life. Much of that decline has been deliberately pushed by the Left and the tabloid press, which is no longer separate from the "mainstream" press. Sociopathy is flying high. Now long-distance diagnosis is not usually a good idea, but Mr. Soros has given us a lot of personal facts to ponder. His is not the profile of a kind man. It is the mind of a narcissist, free of the pangs of conscience, yet haunted by a need to destroy the reputations of decent people for having a different point of view. Soros shows us the sense of infinite superiority of the European Left, always managing to explain away millions of victims, as long as they die somewhere out of sight. But George Soros is not a man at peace with himself, nor with a civilized life that is governed by a sense of responsibility and self-restraint. In his manipulative assaults on the Bush Administration, in peddling the legalization of harmful drugs, in pushing for "campaign reform" and then immediately driving a monster truck through the legal loopholes, George Soros may be trying to chase off his inner demons. He fits perfectly in the company of Bill Clinton and John Kerry, of Hillary and Harry Reid, and all the self-loving, destructive narcissists of the Left. And that little conclusion paragraph sums it all up. Narcissism and psychopathy. |
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| Disgraced Fund-Raiser Hsu Charged in Fraud Scheme | ||
| 2007-09-22 | ||
 A disgraced Democratic fundraiser, Norman Hsu, has been charged with concocting a $60 million "Ponzi" fraud scheme and related federal campaign finance crimes, federal prosecutors said yesterday.
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| Norman Hsu Charged With Fraud in NY |
| 2007-09-21 |
| Federal prosecutors unsealed a criminal complaint Thursday charging Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu with breaking campaign finance laws and creating a "massive" Ponzi scheme. The complaint says Hsu who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton and others violated campaign finance laws by making contributions to candidates in other people's names and perpetrated a Ponzi scheme to defraud victims across the United States of more than $60 million. Robert Emmers, a spokesman for Hsu, declined to comment. Hsu's lawyer in San Francisco, Jim Brosnahan, did not immediately return phone messages Thursday. |
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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Hsu Cast Wide Net For Clinton Donors |
| 2007-09-17 |
| To raise $850,000 for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign in just eight months, Norman Hsu tapped an eclectic group of donors that included wealthy investors in his apparel ventures, hotel shopkeepers, a 96-year-old in a Florida retirement home and an auto-body worker who mistakenly thought he would get a tax break for his political generosity. The Clinton campaign has not yet released any information about the 260 donors whose contributions it is now refunding because they were credited to the prodigious fundraising of the former fugitive, but a detailed analysis of donors Hsu brought to Clinton shows that he tapped many Asian American donors in California and New York, including complete strangers as well as his relatives. He also raised political funds from people who had already invested large sums in his private business ventures. Some donors among the nearly 100 identified this week said they never met Hsu and did not know that their donations had been credited to his fundraising. Others had trouble explaining why they gave the funds to Clinton or could not recall the circumstances in which they met Hsu. "He called me and asked me if I'd give $1,000. . . . I don't know how you'd say we struck up a relationship. I just knew him," said Henry Rosenberg, a New York City lawyer. Asked if he wanted Clinton, New York 's junior senator, to be the next president, Rosenberg said: "I don't know. He just asked me to do it, and I did." ........ < Balance at the link. |
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| '60s Figure Says He Financed Donor Hsu |
| 2007-09-12 |
| Where did Norman Hsu get his money? That has been one of the big questions hanging over the prominent Democratic fund-raiser, as reports have surfaced about hundreds of thousands of dollars he made in political donations, plus lavish parties, fancy apartments and a $2 million bond he posted to get out of jail earlier this month. New documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal may help point to an answer: A company controlled by Mr. Hsu recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run by Joel Rosenman, who was one of the creators of the Woodstock rock ... THE FULL WSJ.com ARTICLE IS ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS. |
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| McCaskill to give up donations related to Hsu |
| 2007-09-12 |
 Sen. Claire McCaskill is joining the ranks of lawmakers who are giving up campaign donations from donors linked to disgraced Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu (shoo). The Missouri Democrat says she made the decision as the cloud of suspicion has grown surrounding contributions from people connected to Hsu. McCaskill took no money directly from Hsu. Her staff has estimated that the senator received more than $18,000 from people reportedly associated with Hsu. |
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| Clintons to Return $850,000 in Hsu Funds | ||
| 2007-09-11 | ||
 Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign dramatically severed all ties to disgraced fundraiser Norman Hsu, announcing Monday night it will return more than $850,000 he raised from some 260 donors.
"Mr. Hsu donated to numerous charities and more than two dozen candidates and committees," Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said. "Despite conducting a thorough review of public records, our campaign like others were unaware of Mr. Hsu's decade-plus old warrant. "To help ensure agsint this type of situation in the future, our campaign will also institute vigorous additional vetting procedures on our bundlers, including criminal background checks," Wolfson added. "In any instances where a source of a bundler's income is in question, the campaign will take affirmative steps to verify its origin." The dramatic return of all Hsu-raised donations was aimed at ending a controversy that awakened comparisons to Bill Clinton's 1990s fund-raising scandal and renewed scrutiny of others major fund-raisers and donors inside Sen. Clinton's presidential campaign. Sen. Clinton "simply didn't want to have to keep answering questions about a bundler whose background is now clearly in question," a senior adviser said, speaking only on condition of anonymity. | ||
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| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| Hsu's Companies Paper Fronts For Illegal Contributions |
| 2007-09-10 |
| (via Captain's Quarters blog) The New York Times has its reporters wearing out some old-fashioned shoe leather in attempting to trace down the source of Norman Hsu's prodigious amounts of money, used to float $1.6 million in personal and bundled contributions to Democratic candidates and organizations. The result? The Times discovered that the companies Hsu listed appear to have only one produce -- salaries for Democratic contributors: At the center of the ever-deepening mystery of Norman Hsu, the fugitive fund-raiser who was captured after a brief flight from the law last week, is the question of how he evolved from a bankrupt swindler in 1992 to a wealthy donor to many Democratic candidates, and a bundler of campaign contributions to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2007. The system described by Mike McIntyre is one that resembles a pyramid scheme, except the only payoff participant were Democratic candidates and organizations. The companies existed to take money from various people and push it through others to get the money to Hsu's political clients. It allowed the money to come through cleanly and to keep it from raising the attention of the FEC. For instance, Components Ltd took $600,000 in receipts one month. These did not come from sales of product, but rather cash transfer from people associated with Hsu's bundled contributions, especially from two specific associates. Components Ltd them sent out $660,000 in the same month to other people connected to Hsu's bundling, although almost $100,000 of those checks bounced. McIntyre closed the gap a little on Hsu's missing years abroad while fleeing the US and a three-year stretch for fraud. He did return to Hong Kong and opened new businesses, but by 1998 he had to declare bankruptcy there as well. The Hong Kong court system does not release the name of the creditor, but they did report that Hsu only emerged from bankruptcy there in 2006 -- two years after he reappeared as a major Democratic fundraiser. Clearly, the feds will find interesting material in this information. The family whose massive contributions led the Wall Street Journal to report on Hsu has been up to their eyeballs in Hsu's shell game. The Paws have wired five-figure funds transfers, despite their modest income. Hsu also wired the Paws significant amounts of money. All of this occurred in May 2003, which predates most of the attention-getting contributions Hsu engineered. Can you say "wire fraud"? I know the FBI can. That carries about a six-year sentence, and once they start interrogating the Paws, the Lees, and the other channels for Hsu's bundling, this case will start to assemble in a hurry. And at that point, perhaps we will get the answer to the big question: where did all of this money really originate? And how did all of these Democrats, including three current or former state Attorneys General, manage to miss all of this illegal activity from one of their biggest rainmakers? |
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| Hsu nabbed in Colorado | ||
| 2007-09-07 | ||
 Disgraced Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu was arrested in Colorado late Thursday after he failed to show up for a court appearance related to a felony theft conviction.
California Attorney General spokesman Gareth Lacy said Hsu's lawyers told prosecutors Hsu arrived by charter jet at the Oakland airport about 5:30 a.m. Wednesday local time and then wasn't heard from again. When it became apparent that Hsu had fled the state, California authorities sought the assistance of the FBI, whose agents arrested him Thursday night on charges of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, Schadler said. Once he is returned to state custody, the federal charges will be dismissed, Schadler said. | ||
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| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| PSYCHOTIC CREEPS, SECRET DEALS, AND SEEDY CONNECTIONS |
| 2007-09-06 |
| In the comments to a post at The Belmont Club (which is a revelation in itself concerning the life and times of Norman Hsu, international man of mystery), Wretchard makes this statement: The existence of Norman Hsu naturally raises the question: how many other Norman Hsus are out there. For the Saudis, for the Mexicans, for the Israelis, maybe, for the Russian oil interests perhaps, and for God knows who else. How many? Consider this: maybe the real reason to avoid war, even in self-defense, is the same reason the Tsarist Empire had reason to avoid war back in 1914. The necessity of never having to put the corrupt parts of the system to the test. The Great War showed up all the secret deals, all the seedy connections, all the unthinkable compromises into which the Russian elite had entered. The revelations the Great War laid bare discredited an entire ruling class. Being a psychopath means never having to face responsibility for the consequences of your actions. There are a number of strategies to ensure this outcome: 1. Make people too afraid to call you to account (terrorists and thugs like this one); 2. Make it worthwhile not to stand in your way (politicians with big bucks like this one); 3. Control any and all information that might expose you for the dysfuntional sociopath you really are (a strategy beloved by all psychopaths, big and small); or, 4. When all else fails, get out of town faster than the lynch mob. I expect that if all the dirt were known, and all the seedy connections and secret deals exposed, there would be few figures standing on either side of the aisle in our own political houses. |
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